Dr Robert Edwards |
Steps from the bustle of downtown
Montreal, the halls of the grand Fairmont Queen Elizabeth
were buzzing with IVF's best and brightest for ISIVF
2007.
Delegates kicked back on plush
lounge sofas, hoping to catch a glimpse of IVF's big
names. Hands-down the most enviable conversational companion
present was none other than Dr Robert Edwards, the Briton
who pioneered the world's first IVF pregnancy almost
30 years ago.
At the scientific sessions, frequently
enveloped in an impenetrable fog of technical jargon,
IVF gurus regaled audience members and fellow panellists
alike with tales of maximizing take-home baby rates
and berated them for failing to avoid the many pitfalls
of oocyte retrieval, fertilization and implantation.
Dr Timothy Krahn
|
Then medical ethics paid a visit.
The ethicists, mostly made up of eggheads from the softer
science disciplines, championed caution and self-reflection.
To the many IVF cowboys and girls present, they were
a laundry basket full of wet blankets. Still others
were a strange subspecies of firebrand moralists, questioning
the very principles of assisted reproduction. I preferred
the latter for sheer entertainment value.
Dalhousie ethics wonk Dr Timothy
Krahn ruffled feathers in his quiet, bookish way. Dr
Krahn is worried that genetic diagnoses of illness in
embryos could eventually lead to a class of designer
baby Übermenschen.
His talk ended in a shouting match
masquerading as a Q&A. One MD accused Dr Krahn of
preferring to see children suffer from diseases like
cystic fibrosis than to benefit from PGD technologies.
That brought a prompt end to the session and left Dr
Krahn floundering like an oxygen-deprived carp at the
podium.
Dr Margaret Somerville
|
But this was merely a sideshow
compared to McGill prof Dr Margaret Somerville's talk.
The Aussie-reared professor of medicine and law's unassuming
demeanour masked a steely determination to challenge
everyone's accepted ideas about IVF — as well as
homosexual parenting and adoption.
The central question of her provocatively
entitled lecture "From Homo sapiens to Techno sapiens:
do children have a human right to natural human origins?"
was helpfully answered almost immediately with a firm
"Yes." Dr Somerville then proceeded to baby-walk the
audience through her ideas on the primacy of the "natural."
Following her own logic, she reached the conclusion
that IVF, by its very nature, violates a child's fundamental
rights. She also tossed one of her favourite old chestnuts
— that gay marriage is bad, but gay parenthood's
worse — on the fire for good measure.
To Dr Somerville's credit, this
talk was the only one this reporter attended where the
constant shuffle of MDs checking their Blackberrys,
snapping slides with their digital cameras and sneaking
out for a coffee stilled for a few precious moments.
Sometimes logic-defying moral abstraction in a plush
setting is just what the doctor ordered. — John
Stobo
|
